STEPHEN and Todd were lying in their tent, deep in the woods, when they heard the screams – which were the desperate cries of a young girl in pain.

They were too scared to move and as the squeals died out, they were replaced by the sound of footsteps coming towards them.

Then, there was a scratching on the thin, blue fabric of the tent, and a ghostly girl appeared at the flap, staring in with eyes of pure white.

The two teenagers had heard eerie rumours of a murderous doctor and a disturbed plague pit in the woods just 15 minutes' walk from Stephen's home – but they never believed the tales of evil spirits were anything more than silly local legends.

Yet by the time they trudged back the next morning, after a long, sleepless night, both boys were certain that the stories were completely true.

Although they had no idea that the worst was yet to come.

The Doomsday Church

Today, Stephen Foster and Todd Bevis still believe that they were the victims of a haunting straight out of a horror film.

But, as they claim in the latest episode of True Horror, their story is completely real – centred on the hellish camping trip they went on when they were still students.

At the time, the lads both enjoyed making silly comedy videos, and they planned to spend a night in the nearby woods to do some Blair Witch-style filming at a spooky local landmark.

Prankster Stephen had set his heart on visiting Saint John's Church, known to locals as the Doomsday Church – an old building in the woods where a doctor supposedly once murdered his wife and buried her remains in the nearby plague pit.

A paranormal blog post about the site claims the disgruntled doctor strangled her among the headstones, and that one night a year – on the day she was killed – you can smell surgical spirit wafting around the graveyard.

"I'd heard stories about Doomsday Church," Stephen says in the docudrama, which mixes eyewitness accounts with dramatisations of supposedly true events.

"We used to prat around pretending places were haunted.

"Then, of course, it happened for real after that."

Eyes in the darkness

Armed with a camera and their bulging backpacks of camping supplies, Stephen and his friend Todd set off into the woods, heading for the church they had heard so much about.

They followed a narrow stone path, hemmed in by thick woodland on either side, until they came to the church and a huddle of graves to the side of it.

"The forest was an eerie sort of place," Todd says on the show. "There was always something lurking around there, from what I heard in stories."

Stephen adds: "There was a feeling of being watched – you weren't alone and you didn't feel right. It was a gut feeling and you couldn't put your finger on it."

The pair pitched their tent nearby and spent the rest of the afternoon larking about with the camera, until there wasn't enough light left to film.

But as dark descended on the woods, Todd saw something through the trees: a pair of gleaming eyes staring right at him.

"My heart was beating so fast – I felt cold and shaky," Todd says.

Stephen adds: "He was panicked by what he had seen, and we still had this feeling of being watched."

Screams in the night

After the eerie sighting, the lads piled back into their tent and tried not to think about the feeling that someone – or something – was watching them.

But their phones and portable DVD player started playing up, and within half an hour, all of their electronic kit was dead.

That's when the screams started – the little girl's cries forcing Stephen and Todd to sit up straight in their little tent, too scared to move.

"It sounded like someone was really hurting her," Todd says.

Stephen says: "This happened on and off for about an hour. We were too scared to leave the tent to venture out and have a look at anything."

When the screams faded away, they were replaced by the unmistakable sounds of someone lumbering towards them – twigs snapping and dry leaves crunching underfoot.

Stephen says: "The next minute, something started scratching the side of the tent."

Panicking, Stephen and Todd scrambled to unzip the tent flap, only to be greeted by the chilling sight of a young girl, around 10 years old, staring right at them.

"In her eyes, there were no pupils – just completely white," Stephen says. "And they glared at us."

Plagued by spirits

The girl vanished and the lads were left shaking with fear for the rest of the night, waiting for the sun to come up.

When they walked home in the morning, neither said a word.

"Everything happened so suddenly," Stephen says. "We experienced so much in one night. It was intense and almost non-stop.

"I remember thinking at the time: why me? I felt like something had latched on to me and I was convinced it had followed me back."

Even once he had returned to the safety of his home, Stephen struggled to get himself together.

"Stephen was very emotional about it," Todd said. "He looked unwell in himself."

For weeks after, Stephen couldn't shake the events of that fateful camping trip, feeling like an evil presence had returned from the woods with him.

When he next had Todd over to his house, another friend, Jamie Hunt, came over as well.

It seemed like a normal evening, until Jamie had a terrifying vision of his own.

"I could see a tall, dark figure in the corner of the room," he says. "I was petrified."

The figure was that of a six-foot man, in a black top hat – just staring silently at the group.

Stephen was convinced that it was the same presence that had followed him on that fateful camping trip.

After that, Stephen became more panicky, and was scared to be left alone in his house.

He says: "I felt like I was a target for this spirit – this thing which had followed me back. I couldn't work out why it was doing it.

"It made me quite ill. I remember getting time off college – I had colds, headaches and struggled to stay awake."

It was almost as if the ghostly doctor from the legends had inflicted a plague on him.

Stephen decided he had no choice but to call a local paranormal expert, Ed Brooker, to ask for help.

Ed, who claims he is a medium, gathered in the living room with the three lads and tried to communicate with the spirit, imploring it to leave the house – and Stephen – alone.

"The spirit was so strong," Stephen says, but Ed said that he had been able to drive the ghost away nonetheless.

Stephen says that Ed's intervention did the trick, but he claims to this day that he never quite got over the events of that camping trip.

He adds: "I remember in the weeks that followed we still felt something, but over time it eased up and got a lot better.

"But after the haunting, I wasn't up to doing funny videos and pratting about like I was before."

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The third and final episode of the trouser-wrecking True Horror series comes after the terrifying story of the "Hellfire Farm" hauntings.

As fans will know, the series is so scary that it comes with a warning.

True Horror airs on Channel 4 at 10pm tonight.

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